6:30pm: After resuming lightly, precipitation in the northern suburbs has broken up again, but it continues in the southern areas and will do so for at least another couple of hours. Most locations to the south and east of DC are reporting light snow.

4:30pm: Some dry air has worked in from the northwest, cutting off the snow at least for now in most of Montgomery, western Fairfax, and eastern Loudoun counties. Radar is still showing steady snow to the southwest and south of DC, so those areas should continue to get precipitation for the next several hours.

2:50pm: Rush Hour Alert: The latest short-term model run shows the heaviest snow should fall between 4 and 7pm. With a slight drop in temperatures, this can turn a light layer of wet snow to slippery ice, especially on bridges and overpasses and untreated secondary roads. Drive carefully! Light snow and flurries have spread across most of the immediate metro area. Here at Afternoon Blog Central in Montgomery County, what began as isolated flakes a little more than an hour ago is now a steady light snow, enough to leave a minimal dusting on elevated surfaces, such as bushes and a picnic table. Evaporative cooling has knocked the temperature here down about 3 degrees to 34. The 6-hour precipitation totals in Virginia show that there is considerable "juice" with this storm: as high as 0.61" at Danville, although that is now in the form of moderate rain. Radar shows heavier and steadier snow moving northward through Virginia, and the rain-snow line is fairly constant from Richmond northeastward to near the mouth of the Potomac. Charlottesville has increased to moderate snow in the past hour.

12:30pm: A review of this morning's model runs shows no major surprises. They confirm the notion that the heaviest precipitation will remain south and east of the immediate metro area. Meanwhile, on radar, the precipitation has filled in over much of northern Virginia, central Maryland, and Delaware. At the surface, Richmond continues to report light snow; it's heavy at Hanover (both at 33&deg). In Maryland, both Ocean City (35&deg) and Salisbury (36&deg) have light snow. Site visitors are reporting flakes in the Fredericksburg vicinity, Woodbridge, and Lexington Park.

11:30am: At late morning, the northern edge of the main area of precipitation extends from a little less than halfway between Charlottesville and DC, across I-95 in the vicinity of King's Dominion, over the mouth of the Potomac and lower Bay, and across the Eastern Shore just south of Ocean City. A streak of mixed frozen precipitation on radar, not reaching the ground, extends northeastward across the northern and western DC suburbs, through the Baltimore and Philadelphia areas and over to the central Jersey shore. Richmond, which had light rain and sleet earlier, has been reporting light snow since shortly after 7am. Elsewhere in central Virginia, Louisa and Hanover also have light snow, but Petersburg has light rain and 36&deg. In the DC metro area, all stations are cloudy with temperatures in the range of 37-39&deg. Let us know in the comments when precipitation begins in your area.

About

This site is the archive for capitalweather.com, a website specializing in Washington DC weather, forecast, and climate information, actively maintained from 2004 through 2008. In 2008, we moved to the Washington Post and continued work as the Capital Weather Gang. You can find links to our current incarnation below. Thanks for browsing.